Cover story … Zagat published a guide to restaurants in the city of 'San Francsico'. Photograph: Fen Oswin/Alamy

Pity the poor publishers of a new guide to San Francisco's best restaurants, which spells the name of the city wrong.

Zagat mistakenly released its new roundup of San Francisco's Bay Area restaurants with an unfortunate error on the spine, according to Inside Scoop SF. The publisher is now attempting to recall its guide to the best eateries in "San Francsico" amid tongue-in-cheek predictions this latest edition could become a collector's item.

"It's terrible and unfortunate and obviously it impacts on their overheads, but it's also not that uncommon," said one publisher, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, about the Zagat mistake. "That would have been looked at by five or six people and not spotted – it took me a few goes to see it as your eye doesn't quite notice it."

The publisher pointed to Penguin Modern Classics, which he said did an edition of Lolita that spelled the author's name as Nabkov on the spine. "Because the round bit of the 'b' is like an 'o', you just don't see it," he said. "It sat in shops for years with hardly anybody noticing, so it does happen."

He also commiserated with the UK publishers of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, an early draft of which was mistakenly released last year – an error blamed on the typesetters. "You hope it's not you but it does happen, and it will happen again," he said. "You just get that utterly sick, pit-of-the-stomach feeling of 'What can we do?".